2025 Performance Report

eBPF Performance Benchmark Report

Comprehensive performance comparison of eBPF-based monitoring vs traditional APM agents. Real-world benchmarks across CPU, memory, latency, and throughput.

Key Findings

10x Lower CPU Overhead

eBPF uses 1.2% CPU vs 12-15% for traditional agents

Impact: Save $1000s/month on compute costs

15x Less Memory

187MB vs 2.8GB for Java agents

Impact: Run more services per host

Near-Zero Latency Impact

0.05ms p99 vs 12.89ms for agents

Impact: Better user experience

Scales to 100K+ req/s

Only 0.8% throughput loss at extreme load

Impact: Handle peak traffic without issues

Benchmark Results

CPU Overhead Comparison

eBPF (HyperObserve)1.2%
1.2%
Java Agent (Traditional)12.5%
12.5%
Python Agent15.3%
15.3%
Node.js Agent11.8%
11.8%
Go Instrumentation8.4%
8.4%

Memory Usage

eBPF (HyperObserve)

187MB

Java Agent

2840MB

Python Agent

1920MB

Node.js Agent

1560MB

Go Agent

980MB

Latency Impact (ms)

PercentileeBPF (HyperObserve)Traditional AgentsDifference
p500.01ms0.89ms89x slower
p900.02ms2.34ms117x slower
p950.03ms4.67ms156x slower
p990.05ms12.89ms258x slower

Throughput Degradation (%)

1K req/s
eBPF: 0.1%Traditional: 3.2%
10K req/s
eBPF: 0.3%Traditional: 8.7%
50K req/s
eBPF: 0.5%Traditional: 15.4%
100K req/s
eBPF: 0.8%Traditional: 23.6%

Test Environment

Hardware

  • CPU: Intel Xeon Platinum 8375C @ 2.90GHz (32 cores)
  • Memory: 128GB DDR4 ECC
  • Storage: NVMe SSD 2TB
  • Network: 25 Gbps

Software

  • OS: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Kernel 5.15)
  • Container: Docker 24.0.7
  • Orchestration: Kubernetes 1.28
  • Load Testing: K6 with 1000 VUs

Workloads

  • Microservices: 50-service mesh
  • Database: PostgreSQL 15 with 1M queries/min
  • Message Queue: Kafka with 500K msg/sec
  • Cache: Redis with 2M ops/sec

Get the Full Report

Download the complete 25-page benchmark report with detailed methodology, additional test cases, and implementation recommendations.

Full Report Includes:

  • Complete test methodology
  • 20+ additional benchmarks
  • Language-specific results
  • Implementation guidelines
Download Full Report (PDF)

Frequently Asked Questions

Everything you need to know about zero-instrumentation monitoring and HyperObserve

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